Data scientists matter because data science is the future of IT — Data | GigaOM

While some are hoping for better software to reduce the need for data scientists, WibiData’s Omer Trajman thinks we need more of them. Better software, he argues, is actually just a tool to make it easier for data scientists to do world-changing work.

data scientistphoto: Shutterstock / Minerva Studio

Data scientists are changing the way decisions happen by making better use of big data. Rather than finding ways around them, we need to make data science more accessible as a profession and need to provide easier tools for data scientists.

Kevin Kelly, in “Better Than Human,” tells us how the future is going to go down. As we increasingly automate existing occupations, we create new jobs in order to instruct and direct those robots. We build robots to take over the instructional positions, and create new jobs that set parameters and develop feedback loops. We build new systems that are flexible and dynamic and create more new jobs — such as data scientists — to analyze and build models for these new systems. It is obvious that in such a world, where static models cannot keep up, data scientists will be indispensable.

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simplystatistics:

Interview with Rebecca Nugent of Carnegie Mellon University.

In this episode Jeff and I talk with Rebecca Nugent, Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. We talk with her about her work with the Census and the growing interest in statistics among undergraduates.

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The hot tech gig of 2022: Data scientist - Fortune Tech By the end of the decade 50 billion devices will be emitting information nonstop. Data scientists will help manage it all. A decade from now the smart techies who decided to become app developers may wish they had taken an applied-mathematics class or two. The coming deluge of data (more on that in a moment) will create demand for a new kind of computer scientist — a gig that’s one part mathematician, one part product-development guru, and one part detective. D.J. Patil is a pioneer in the field of data science, a new discipline that aims to organize and make sense of all the data generated by machines. It’s a challenge that will grow exponentially over the next decade. Tech in 2012: Face-offs, failures and fairly big changes at the office Today there are some 400 million devices connected to the Internet, mostly phones and computers. By 2020 some 50 billion devices, from cars to appliances, will be talking to one another. And companies will need teams of data scientists like Patil to sort through everything from internal inventory metrics to customer tweets. The role is so important that Greylock Partners has hired Patil to serve as a “data scientist in residence” to help its portfolio companies mine their data for patterns or stats that will make them more efficient or smarter than their competitors.

The hot tech gig of 2022: Data scientist - Fortune Tech

By the end of the decade 50 billion devices will be emitting information nonstop. Data scientists will help manage it all.

A decade from now the smart techies who decided to become app developers may wish they had taken an applied-mathematics class or two. The coming deluge of data (more on that in a moment) will create demand for a new kind of computer scientist — a gig that’s one part mathematician, one part product-development guru, and one part detective.

D.J. Patil is a pioneer in the field of data science, a new discipline that aims to organize and make sense of all the data generated by machines. It’s a challenge that will grow exponentially over the next decade.

Tech in 2012: Face-offs, failures and fairly big changes at the office

Today there are some 400 million devices connected to the Internet, mostly phones and computers. By 2020 some 50 billion devices, from cars to appliances, will be talking to one another. And companies will need teams of data scientists like Patil to sort through everything from internal inventory metrics to customer tweets. The role is so important that Greylock Partners has hired Patil to serve as a “data scientist in residence” to help its portfolio companies mine their data for patterns or stats that will make them more efficient or smarter than their competitors.

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